Over the sound of the coughing and the songs of the birds in the meadow, Canyon heard the low rumble of a diesel truck.
“You guys, shh. Someone’s coming.”
The older boy quickly ground out the cigarette under the heel of his boot. “Oh, shit. We’re royally fucked if we get caught with this. I stole it from my mom’s jewelry box.”
“What do we do?” the younger boy said. He was in a panic. His dad was twice as mean as the older boy’s dad.
“Quick, up there,” the older boy said, and pointed up a small hill. “We can hide.”
The boys took off running toward the hill. Canyon quickly fell behind, his breathing labored, his nose more stuffed up than ever. He felt too hot and he wondered if he had a fever. Stupid idiots. He should have known better than to follow a couple of losers like them into the woods.
He reached them finally, and found them lying flat on their bellies, on the backside of the small hill.
“Wha-” he started to say, and then the older boy was grabbing him and pulling him down on the hill and wrapping a hand across his mouth that smelled of tuna fish salad and motor oil. Canyon struggled against the big kid and then stopped when he saw what they were looking at, down at the creek below them.
Canyon’s eyes grew wide as saucers. He watched, afraid to look away, afraid that if he did, the man would move and maybe make his way across the creek and up the hill to them.
The man wore a dark shirt, and blue jeans, and a ball cap pulled low against the sun. The woman wore a red dress, fitted at the waist and collar, like the one Canyon’s mother wore to dinner with his father sometimes. A pickup truck was parked in the shade, under a tree. Someone sat in the passenger seat, hidden in the shadows, a cowboy hat pulled low.
The woman lay on the sandy bank of the creek, and the man tugged at her arm, pulling her toward the water, but she was stuck, caught on something. He cursed, loudly, and gave a mighty heave, and the woman’s head flopped back so that her eyes stared up at the children.
But they were beyond seeing a thing, those eyes, and Canyon felt a slow trickle make its way through his jockey shorts and down his legs. The older boy felt the wetness and pulled away from Canyon and then realized he still had his hand over the boy’s mouth, so he pulled that away, too.
The man got the woman’s body to the edge of the water. He whispered something and paused, brushing his hands on the seat of his pants.
And then Canyon sneezed, a great honking noise that filled the air like a flock of geese.
The man’s head jerked up, so fast the kids never had a chance. The man looked across the creek and up over a small hill and saw two boys staring at him, their eyes filled with horror. The top of a third head, Canyon’s, was bowed, the aftereffect of his sneeze, and by the time Canyon got his eyes back up, the man was knee-deep in the river, crossing over to them.
“Run,” the older boy shouted. He and the younger boy took off toward the trail while Canyon panicked. He rolled down the hill and landed in a thicket, under thorny brambles and deep foliage. He heard the sound of a car door slam and he froze. He knew the passenger in the truck was joining the chase.
The hunt.
Canyon tucked his head down and curled into a tight ball and closed his eyes. He stayed there for hours it seemed, until finally he heard doors open and slam again, and the diesel truck’s throaty engine start up and peel out of the woods on the old lumber road that led back into town.
Canyon Kirshbaum paused, took a deep breath, and wiped at the tears that streaked his cheeks.
His mother tsked-tsked from her spot in the bed. “When I came home from work, I found him in his bedroom, his clothes soaked in dirt and urine. He was in shock. I got enough out of him to piece together what had happened, and then I put him in a hot bath and we never spoke of it again.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “You never went to the police, even after news of the missing boys hit the next day?”
The old woman shook her head. “Canyon never told me who he was with. He just said it was some kids from school, some older kids. I didn’t know it was those boys. Besides, those cops would never have believed a word I said. And I couldn’t risk it, for Canyon’s sake. I just couldn’t.”
Finn swore. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom, a look of disgust on his face. “And you, Canyon, you never saw the man again?”
Canyon shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Misery filled the big man’s eyes, prompting a fresh round of tears. “That’s the damnable shame of it all. We never saw his face, none of us. He saw the cousins’, but we never saw his goddamn face. That hat blocked everything. If only he’d known he was safe. I don’t know if he even knew I was there. Otherwise, they’d have kept hunting.”
I couldn’t believe it. The woman in the red dress had to be Rose Noonan, whose body had been found downstream a month after the boys disappeared. The Woodsman had killed the McKenzie boys, thinking they could identify him as her killer.
And Canyon had lived, simply because the man hadn’t seen his face. Unbelievable. The universe was filled with enough mystery that sooner or later, you stopped questioning it and started seeing the perfect, the goddamn perfect, sense of it all.
Beneath me, the bedsprings shook and then settled. Mrs. Kirshbaum was pale but dry-eyed. She stared at me. “I suppose you think I’m contemptible, don’t you? You’ll see, once you have that baby. You’ll see.”
“See what?” Canyon demanded. “All I know is that you had an opportunity to help those kids, and you didn’t. You let me-no, you made me-forget what I’d seen. Like it never even happened. All those years, all those nightmares I had growing up… You kept telling me none of it was real, that I’d just imagined all of it. My God. To think that a part of me knew, that a part of me remembered all this time what happened to those poor little boys.”
Canyon pulled a tissue from the box in the windowsill and blew his nose. He continued. “When you started talking about that afternoon, it felt like I was drowning and your words were an arm, reaching down to me, pulling me up and out of a big, black fog. I remember. I remember everything. And I’ll remember until the day I die, long after you’re gone. You were wrong not to go to the police, and you were wrong to let me think those years of nightmares were the result of a naughty, overactive imagination.”
“You’ll see. A mother’s love doesn’t know right or wrong. A mother’s love just… is,” Mrs. Kirshbaum whispered, and closed her eyes. “What should I have done? Gone to the police and told them my son thinks he saw a dead woman about to be disposed of? That he and some kids were doing drugs-drugs!-in the woods? They’d never have believed me. And if it was true-if it was true-well, then Canyon would have been in danger.”
Understanding bloomed. “You had a record, didn’t you? That’s why you were afraid the cops wouldn’t believe you.”
Her eyes still closed, the old woman lifted a hand to her sagging breast and rubbed at it. Her hand traveled to her throat and she began to scratch at something on her skin.
“I never stole a dime from anyone. I cleaned that woman’s house for ten years and she blames me when her silver goes missing. Not the Mexican gardener or the black plumber. Me, the Jew whore. She turned everyone in town against me. It was only by the grace of God that Mr. McGuckin was so desperate for help that he gave me a job. But he watched me like a hawk, you bet he did.”